Gross and tasteless...this high-school romp mixes the gross and tasteless with sentimental mush.

The overall tone is one of mild Sex Pistols excess combined with Monkees-era high jinks.

A reassuring little cheeseball of a movie.

Should have been an inaudible man movie. Every time the characters open their mouths, they hammer it deeper into the ground.

Any richness in the drawing of the backgrounds only underscores the weirdly flat, affectless renderings of the characters moving through them.

The question in Red Planet isn't whether there's any life on Mars, but whether there's any life in the film. The answer is no.

How inept is Serving Sara? It makes even Elizabeth Hurley seem graceless and ugly.

A lame romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor comedic.

Devoid of personality and has an annoying gratuitous sentimental streak.

Like criticizing the light fixtures on the Titanic. This ship was going down anyway.

Pretty lame stuff. Already it seems to be passing with the speed of light into the limbo of utterly forgettable "who-will-I-take-to-the-prom?" movies.

Positively reeks of self-importance -- the jokey, ham-fisted, pseudo-socially relevant, punch-pulling kind. It reeks worse of acting -- the Jack-Lemmon-in-a-coma Kevin Spacey kind.

Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.

Probably would have worked better as a slamming soundtrack than as a muddle-headed movie.

By the time I saw poor Tim crushed, head to toe, by a falling sheet of plate glass, I was certain I hadn't signed up for anything this punishing.

Cradle of lifelessness.

This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.

House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.

The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.

The trouble with the movie is basically everything. It's long, sloppy, and -- to both the quantum-physics ignorant and informed -- steadily implausible, never exciting in either its skill or its ludicrousness.

Harwood's screenplay obscures any sort of philosophical, religious, or historical considerations in favor of pulpy and faith-bruising sensationalism.

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

No one on the screen bothers to commit to a character.

Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.

Because the characters in the movie have only stock obsessions and vague personal histories, there's no reason to be interested in them.

Not as desperate, unfunny, and nonsensical as its title. It's worse. Worse than you can imagine. Unless, of course, you've imagined 90-something minutes of bloopers and outtakes that congeal into a story -- much the way a scab is formed.

The movie is as grim and grave as the comic book. But it lacks atmosphere. It's often illogical and drubs you numb with its single dimension: noisy retribution.

The 6-year-old I went with had the villain pegged in the first 15 minutes. Needless to say, she completely ruined the movie for me. Meddling kid.

There's not much of a script. The direction is the pits, and stars Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore, playing dueling divorce lawyers who fall in love, are lousy, too.

The movie's no good: It's written, directed, performed, photographed, edited, and marketed on a fifth-grade reading level; despite that and its twin stars' saucer eyes and ropy limbs, it's no Muppet movie either.

It's hard to have sympathy for a movie that tosses in the old shower sneak-up sequence or allows its characters to speak as obviously as possible while standing in a pool of red liquid.

The resulting movie is a nauseating flight of Hollywood navel-gazing.

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.

With its lifeless animation, characterless characters, and plotless plot, Yu-Gi-Oh! is so flat as to make the card game on which it is based seem positively three-dimensional.

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.

Put it this way: National Lampoon's Gold Diggers makes "The Anna Nicole Show" look sophisticated.

Just bland behavioral propaganda, and Holmes makes such a guileless and robotic spokeswoman, it wouldn't be nuts to think the White House was just another mansion in Stepford.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.

Shyer's version is a thing of infinite emptiness and nauseating vanity. It's not funny, alluring, affecting, or erotic, just conceited.

It has a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for romance will find only cardboard lovers. People looking for a resounding musical will find it odd that the camera runs away from the lip-synching cast. And people looking for opera -- well, shame on you.

As she sashays, mirthlessly, from one thankless confrontation to the next, it's unclear why anyone would find Garner any more deserving of stardom than certain mannequins.

This gnarly and illogical little sitcom is bound to make any adult reconsider that next outing with the kids.

Messing should know this is precisely the kind of movie Grace would ridicule Will for dragging her to see.

Barely any of it is funny, and if a minute of it is meant in mockery, few of the darts ever find the board.

A deplorable piece of cynicism whose only point of interest is Gael Garcia Bernal's accent

Scares up few chills.

The latest cannibalization of a popular older horror film.

''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon.

One could forgive a budget this threadbare, performances this amateurish, a plot this tortuous if the 3-D effects passed the cool test. Sadly, watching ''Adventures" is an experience akin to seeing the world through dung-colored glasses.

What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure.

It's ultimately just a rigorous personal training film made by people who don't seem to like movies or the people who go to them.

The fun of these movies is that Linney often seems too refined for such greasy junk, but there she is anyway, hamming it down as it were.

A genre cheapie from its digital-video camerawork to its Casiotone soundtrack to its bland, buff cast, the movie is a cultural watershed in a dry gulch.

It's a family comedy-drama that wants to pluck the heartstrings but keeps getting tangled in its own tinny sentiment.

If ridiculous, hackneyed, gratuitously violent slasher movies aren't your thing, don't go near Venom with a 10-foot snake pole.

His [Director Tony Scott's] pornographic lust for bloodletting, gunplay, and out-of-control camerawork far exceeds his abilities to tell a story.

Neither thrilling nor psychological, but it's chicly shot and edited and is pretty much art-directed to death.

Aeon Flux is the sophomore picture from Karyn Kusama, who's first movie was a modest boxing film called "Girlfight." Here she's in over her head. The movie's sexual and scientific ideas never come through, and the characters would be fun only if they came with a joystick.

An embarrassing romantic comedy from Rob Reiner.

This is by far the most embarrassing of his seven movies.

Charm-free, incoherent, and heartlessly sentimental, this woodenly animated co-production by American, British, and French companies offers boredom and irritation for parents, needlessly scary images for tots, and, for the pubescent boys who apparently run mass culture, a flatulent blue moose. It's ugly to look at, too.

A depressing piece of gun-crazy Hollywood scuzz that, with its gassy style and runaway immorality, makes a Tony Scott movie look like a Robert Bresson picture.

Jovovich is bad, and not in a good way. She turns in an epically expressionless performance (maybe she thought it was one of her modeling gigs?) but she sure looks great.

''Health Inspector" hopes to do for Larry what ''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" did for Jim Carrey, who in this context looks like Noel Coward.

The accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

Part sketch-comedy cartoon, part Cracked magazine spoof, installment four is the most scornfully made yet.

An oddly unsexy melodrama in which every supposedly shocking revelation (rape, incest, homosexuality, pedophilia) is treated with the same blithe shrug of recognition. It's numbing, especially with the film's deadly serious mood.

The Lost City is Andy Garcia's ballad to Havana during the Cuban revolution. You'll have to forgive the penthouse view, though -- it's the only one Garcia can seem to find.

This mangy comedy only demonstrates that Lohan's star power is too bright for falling into mounds of mud, rooting around in cat litter for a contact lens, and getting punched out by a roughneck jailbird, as she does here.

It's a terrible sign for a movie when the sole reason for its existence is a satanic opening date.

This is a movie that's built around characters the audience is bound to find more insufferable than anyone does in the movie itself.

Making a comedy that celebrates binge drinking and cretinous behavior isn't a crime against nature. Making one that's as brutally unfunny as Beerfest is.

Too confused to provide any thrills, even indecent ones.

The new prequel isn't really a slasher movie at all. It's a mess, with too much to say, and an odd genre in which to preach.

The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,

Television is a state of mind. And the makers of Saw III have delivered the most despicable episode of "One Life to Live" ever.

The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").

A pallidly "hip" revision of classic fairy tales that would be better told straight up if anyone had the nerve. It will divert small children, but so will a brightly colored object if you twirl it.

It's another standard-issue bad star-vehicle action-comedy, this time for Cedric.

If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.

A sloppily made bowl of reheated chick-flick cliches.

With a "Lost"-meets-"The Haunting" plot and a handful of convoluted thematic twists involving family, history, murder, and death, The Abandoned limps into a nebulous kind of horror netherworld, peppered with painfully long tension-building sequences and unimaginative dialogue.

It's a movie only a psychic could love, since a psychic would know to stay home or see "Zodiac" instead.

Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.

After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?

An action flick loaded with cars, chrome, and silicone, is everything you'd expect it to be, and yet so much less: less character development, less believability, and most unforgivably, less escapist entertainment.

French Kiss is a French miss. It's got the settings, but it has little magic, less charm and almost no chemistry between Meg Ryan's heartsick American innocent and Kevin Kline's shady Frenchman. [5 May 1995, p.57]

Van Sant winds up with disconnected, dispirited pieces that never come together and lift off the screen with a whoosh of sly high spirits. [20 May 1994]

Adrian Lyne pulls out more manipulative nonsense than Machiavelli ever thought of. Lyne stops at nothing to provoke artificial sentimental feelings from the audience. Like the movie itself, the audience's reaction is only skin deep. [18 Sep 1987, p.58]

It plays like a crude "Godfather" parody, the sort that might amuse as a 10-minute sketch on "Saturday Night Live," but curdles and collapses as a 143-minute film. [09 Dec 1983]

Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.

Staying Alive, the sequel to John Travolta's "Saturday Night Fever," plays like wet cement. [16 Jul 1983]

If you were ever curious how a bad director can destroy the work of two talented actors and a slight, but funny, script, you need look no further than Educating Rita. [28 Oct 1983]

Although the limits on Beverly Hills Cop III are pretty obvious, it's not a total write-off. Still, it's time to stop making movies about Murphy's Motown cop and start making one about Serge. [25 May 1994, p.69]

Its squandering of talent makes Class Action a film that deserves to be disbarred, not reviewed. [15 Mar 1991]

Lethal Weapon 3 is a big, dumb, noisy, comic strip of a movie that begins and ends in flames.

The concept of Air America is refreshing, but its enactment goes nowhere fast. [10 Aug 1990]

Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte are back in Another 48 HRS., and so is some of the chemistry between them. But although this sequel is more amped up than the original "48 HRS.," most of the thrills are gone. [8 Jun 1990, p.35]

Mississippi Burning plays loose with truth, turning the history of the civil rights movement on its head. The filmmakers shamelessly transform what was ultimately a triumph of due process and nonviolent civil disobedience into an ugly might-makes-right spectacle. It's "Dirty Harry" coming at you from the left. [27 Jan 1989, p.72]

The moviemaking is driven only by contempt; he (Roth) wants to nauseate us into submission.

It's amazingly suspenseless and devoid of substance. [05 Mar 1993]

Hampton's directorial inexperience shows, and the film remains curiously disjointed and devoid of suspense. [06 Dec 1996]

Nightwatch quickly declines from creepy to silly. [17 Apr 1998]

Johnny Suede is too devoid of content to sustain our interest. [19 Sep 1992]

The only thing that keeps Cool World from imploding is that Bakshi turns it into a series of animator's riffs, with little explosions of toon action erupting like video game novas into the foreground of the story that isn't happening. [10 Jul 1992]

This one is hollow and caves in on itself, growing wearisome and posed, ending in a burst of salvational violence and a coda of sentimentality masquerading as transcendent toughness. [13 Jan 1995]

Return is a slow-paced, incompetently directed film with both eyes focused on the box office. [26 Mar 1983]

Phar Lap wastes its brilliant potential through embarrassingly inept acting, a cloying soundtrack, stereotyped characters and pedestrian direction. [13 Jul 1984]

Producer Ray Stark and director John Huston have relied more on the rigid style of the comic strip than on the high-steppin' pizazz of the Broadway show. They've transformed a big-hearted hit that won seven Tonys into a small- minded musical. [18 Jun 1982]

If unused spit takes, flubbed dialogue, and extra improvisation are so uproarious, why not give us 90 minutes of that? License to Wed is tolerable for about five.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

The Ten is a virtually snicker-free exercise in audience pain. It's less a movie than an endurance test.

Fun here is fleeting.

As with Zombie's two previous schlock horror features, "House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects," the atmosphere here isn't so much tense and jolting as unnervingly weird and gory, but it's effective.

This is less an affront to women than it is to comedy.

A dull little PG-rated spook story for tweener girls.

Virtuosity doesn't really compute, but there's going to be more of its kind of cyberaction, not less. [4 Aug 1995, pg. 51]

The movie tries going for a laugh or two. It even makes stabs at irony. But since none of the story is suspenseful, remotely believable, or, at the very least, cheaply entertaining, who cares?

Like most family movies these days, "Alvin" is torn between the glitz that sells and the homilies that endure. It's a load of Ting Tang Wallet-Wallet Bling Blang.

The latest Guy Ritchie shoot-em-up, is a joke. You laugh with it but mostly at it.

This is the sort of movie where men stand blankly over dead loved ones, then start digging. Masculine stoicism or emotional botox? You decide.

By far the funniest part of Strange Wilderness is the trailer for "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" that's running before it.

A tedious adventure-romance.

You've seen dozens of movies like this on cable in the wee hours.

It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.

So, yea, it is a stinker. But it is prophesied that in six months time you shall come across 10,000 B.C.’ in the land of Pay-Per-View. And you shall say: ‘‘Pass the popcorn.’’

Might as well have been written by a rushed piece of software. The program calls for a surprise engagement, a street fight complete with crotch punches, an apartment eviction, and a runaway child - all in about five minutes. As an obstacle course, this is mighty efficient. As comic storytelling, it's painful, not too far from being socked in the crotch.

I've seen Pacino over the edge. This is not it. He looks pooped and pickled. Maybe being the only thing standing between a megaplex opening and a trip straight to the $4.99 bin at Target wiped him out.

The movie actually does feel like an Americanized work of Hong Kong moviemaking. But the desperate, derivative style, the nonsense plotting, and leggy, horny women are applied like too much MSG.

When it was over I felt vaguely embarrassed. I wasn't just leaving a movie theater. I was taking a walk of shame.

You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career.

This is the first time we've seen Myers in the flesh since he committed assault and battery on Dr. Seuss, and I wish the cat had stayed in the hat.

On just about every occasion in Meet Dave, Murphy appears to be on the verge of cracking himself up. This is good news. At least someone found him funny.

When this Vin Diesel vehicle isn't pointlessly frenzied, it's narratively inert, wasting some decent production design, and a French-flavored cast primed for fun.

Manages a fairly rare trick: It's a movie that's both deeply felt and completely phony.

There's a cheap thrill in watching Hudson defuse Cook's pig antics with some foulness of her own.

The movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the cliches of the genre take over.

At nearly two hours, Mirrors is overlong for a summer horror toss-off, and the movie's three or four false endings make it seem even more of a haul.

This is not a movie that has great passion for pleasures of the flesh. Its sexiest scenes involve bullets cutting through the air in the slowest motion possible.

Forget the metaphors, why not just make a movie about poor, exploited Mexicans?

A brutally inane movie.

Taken? You bet.

Playing Clouseau's exasperated boss, Cleese rams his head into a wall minutes into the action. That's a powerful image, insofar as his headache was mine.

The movie might have worked if it winked more - or if it played things completely straight.

If you thought the world couldn't get enough of bad spoof movies, you thought wrong.

There's nothing in Echelon Conspiracy as suspenseful or entertaining as your average episode of "24."

This is a movie for the overcaffeinated, undereducated teenager in all of us.

A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.

There is still a great horror movie about foreclosure to be made. In the meantime, this movie plays games. (How many rounds of hide-and-seek should an audience tolerate?)

Despite all the hyperventilating, the movie fails to consider what these crimes mean when, say, the residents of the White House happen to be black. The filmmakers recognize that identity politics are often a trap door. But it's one they're helpless to save themselves from falling through.

You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.

Any good will the movie generates, though, is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.

Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.

This movie brings to mind much better cable TV shows like the marijuana comedy "Weeds,’" the one-on-one psychodramas of "In Treatment," and the astonishingly cinematic "Breaking Bad."

Follows the imaginatively bankrupt trend of remaking slasher films from the 1970s and ’80s. This time, it’s a regurgitation of Mark Rosman’s “The House on Sorority Row.’’

The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.

The Fourth Kind doesn’t build, instill, or maintain an audience’s fear. It just spends 98 minutes trying to prove that what you’re watching actually happened.

Like a lot of action-movie directors, Gray lacks the imagination to view the art of cat-and-mouse as more than a chance to play with state-of-the-art war technology.

Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.

Thurman is bespectacled again for Motherhood, and it saddens me to report that neither she nor this comedy turns into more than an argument against procreation.

For what it’s worth, Tooth Fairy is a somehow dimmer cousin of those Tim Allen “Santa Clause’’ movies.

It winds up being predictably charmless and forgettable, even as a travelogue or iPod download.

Tom Six's movie has the freakiness and sadism of its genre, but it's so heavy with self-appreciation -- Dude, we had the craziest premise for a movie! -- that it can't lift off into the perverse ecstasy of decent exploitation. That was also the problem with "Snakes on a Plane.''

Romero's Hatfields-and-McCoys setup feels more random than creative, and the idea that they're all Irish -- or cowboys! -- is more desultory still.

Just as I was beginning to hope that she’d (Heigl) find a part that called for intelligence and sophistication and backbone, she plays another uptight naif.

The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.

Material this banal needs a madman of David Lynch proportions to incinerate it. Hackford leaves it intact, forcing us to regard a car he doesn't have the guts or skill to crash.

Non-"Twilight'' fans would be better off surfing YouTube.

The film's centerpiece is a massacre at a wet T-shirt contest, which the horror director Alexandre Aja has a good time staging (yes, Eli Roth, we see you with the water gun). But it feels like an imitation of B-movie beach schlock and John Waters. The visual humor lacks wit or nerve.

So nonchalant is Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth movie in Paul W.S. Anderson's dystopian franchise, that its overarching premise isn't explained.

Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.

I watched at least a quarter of My Soul to Take, the worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever, with the glasses off. It was shot - and is available - in a standard format, and, like many conversions, the 3-D gimmick is like watching a movie through an ashtray.

The Strauses don't care about how to keep an audience. Their movie has no sense of suspense or dread - Skyline is an apocalypse movie that plods like one of Romero's zombies.

Picture Timberlake in the booth recording his lines and you have the best joke in the movie. Everything else is actively painful, a frenetic, unfunny mix of action, romance, dud dialogue, and icky things popping out of the screen.

A migraine inducement that you'd think Jack Black had gotten out of his system years ago. Yet he still finds an excuse to wear a blazer and shorts and fling his bodily orb like Angus Young on Guitar Hero night at the neighborhood bar.

After a while, the movie tires of the witch business and trots out a plot twist that permits the effects department to spend money. Some moviegoers might find the bait-and-switch funny.

Howard never decides on tones that complement each other, and the dissonance is jarring.

It's the latest in the blank-from-hell genre, in which misogyny and entertainment are made to seem indistinguishable while the blank makes life hell for someone who then is cornered into striking back.

Fresh or not, creatively merited or not, here it comes: the third installment of Martin Lawrence's big, dopey franchise.

Drive Angry is something new for Cage - a movie that feels like it's straight FROM cable.

The characterization couldn't be more flagrant if the soundtrack creaked out an oldie by a certain ancient pop quintet: You're a candy girl.

If you're a fan of this Lord, find a copy of the 1999 DVD "Lord of the Dance" and don't waste your time with this flat vanity piece.

Hop may have taken years to design and animate, but it feels as if minutes were required to compose it.

Grant and Parker stand around as if they're waiting for someone to yell, "Cut.'' He's in one movie. She's in another. Neither is any good.

By the time the giant, snarling spider shows up - the most boggling of the movie's various "holy schnitzel" touches - parents of the littlest "Hoodwinked" fans may be feeling hoodwinked themselves.

The film is remarkably stunted.

You don't want to think, what would Preston Sturges or Alexander Payne do with this material? But there is a seed of satirical cynicism in this movie that a smart, clear mind could have finessed. Jake Kasdan is not that director. He doesn't appear to know what to do.

Even by the standards of mental-institution-movie misogyny, what an accidental but predictable creepshow this is.

It's not that Jenna Fischer is miscast in A Little Help. It's that she's mis-everything else: misused, misdirected, misanthropic.

A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie.

Heartlessness, stupidity, cynicism, and greed are a demoralizing combination for movie-going. We pay to see a movie that doesn't respect us for being there at all.

Never thought we'd say this about a movie, but Bucky Larson probably doesn't wring as much out of recurring bodily-fluid gags as it could.

Deep in the swampy hearts and minds of some filmmakers, embarrassing stereotypes still fester, gathering moss and slime.

One of those movies that an audience knows is terrible the minute it starts.

The Women on the 6th Floor is delicate and sensitive and utter bollocks - a bourgeois wet dream made to soothe the souls and stir the loins of powerful men in midlife crisis. But some of us wish we could see this movie told from the maids' point of view.

None of what we see is at all credible.

New Year's Eve is fun in the way that eating at a buffet is fun. It's two hours of foods that have nothing to do with each other piled high on a plate because it was too cheap to resist.

Whatever character they bring to their lines, the actors' voices are mostly unrecognizable after being digitally 'munk-ified.

Once upon a time, you'd go to see a grade-C genre movie like this willing to trade consistency and artfulness for a few stray thrills or oddball charm. But Darkest Hour doesn't have even as much character as those Discover commercials.

It's got both a soap opera plotline and a Chuck Norris-load of taxpayer-financed gadgets and gear. It also has Reese Witherspoon in another terrible part.

Ramsay delivers an overdirected, conceptually obnoxious art film that's torture to sit through, listen to, and think about.

This purposefully bad dystopian gangsta drama - imagine a "Boyz 'n the Hood,'' "Mad Max,'' and "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo'' mash-up - simply fails.

The movie wants us to find this frightening, but there's no suspense, no terrifying images.